High-Altitude Balloon Tweets Earth 49
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the do-that-yourself dept.
from the do-that-yourself dept.
celsomartinho writes "Spacebits is yet another low-cost High-Altitude Balloon (HAB) with a computer probe being launched to near space on 30 May, this time in Portugal. The twist with this project, besides the cool electronics, cameras, and sensors on board, is the fact that the team provided the online community with a real-time web dashboard so that everyone can follow the two-hour journey up to 100,000 feet and back to earth. Real-time data includes measurements from all its sensors, including temperature, pressure, humidity and air quality, altitude, acceleration, and GPS coordinates and a live Twitter feed. The team is also using a public GSM network to send SMS lat/lon/alt coordinates to anyone willing to go on launch site and participate in the probe hunt." The balloon goes off Memorial Day weekend, so bookmark the page if you're on call.
Re:Launch platform (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon [wikipedia.org]
And one of the teams in Lunar X Prize plans to use it, I believe. It even seems like a dedicated amateur team might ease their way into space that way, too (at least if by "space" we mean strictly "just a bit above 100km", suborbital flight)
Re:Launch platform (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, this is not only possible, but happening. I don't know about getting to the Moon, but getting into orbit is something that is actively being tried. One really cool video of a rocket getting launched off of a balloon can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnq3r3tRVP0 [youtube.com]
This was launched by JP Aerospace [jpaerospace.com] and is the real thing, from a balloon flying at 10k feet. It was merely a demo flight to test the flight control hardware and to make sure that a rocket actually would launch... and in this case it was just an Estes rocket shoved in a tube when the flight computer remotely ignited the fuse to launch the rocket. The trick was to get the rocket to launch at all, not necessarily to go anywhere.
One other interesting group is the N-Prize [n-prize.com] that is offering a £10k prize for the first team to launch something into orbit for under £1000. What is really crazy is that there are several teams working on the idea, and that some of them are actually in the process of "bending metal" and trying to make it work. Even if it is just a ping-pong ball sent into orbit, that would be some kind of accomplishment to get a payload of that size to orbital velocities.
Yet another group using this approach is ARCA [googlelunarxprize.org], and these guys are trying to get to the Moon. They are one of the original X-Prize teams that showed some real promise and have kept tweaking their rocket designs, with the latest attempts for getting to orbit using a very different kind of rocket staging system that you've simply got to see to believe. It pulls up each stage on a tether instead of pushing it up as a disintegrating pyramid.... presumably to develop economies of scale. They are doing most of their launches over the Black Sea, and is perhaps the one group using balloons that I think will get into orbit first.
Portugese Meters? (Score:3, Informative)
There were a few meters on the page to measure things but they were all in English.
I assume you are talking about units of distance. Metres are used almost everwhere exept the USA. Not just Portugal.
30,000m does not round nicely to anything from the pre-industrial measurement system. According to my phone, it is 98,425.1968504 feet, 149.1290861 furlongs and a load of other peculiar things that nobody has ever heard of. The best I can offer is 18.6410985 miles.
Re:Launch platform (Score:3, Informative)
The advantages of getting up to 100km first by balloon is at least some of the following points:
I'm sure other significant points could be made here for what other advantages could be had with a balloon launch. I agree that the goal is to get into orbit, and that the energy budget is a key contributing factor there. I just don't think that the energy budget is necessarily the one thing keeping the cost of spaceflight so high, and that some alternative approaches ought to be at least tried, no matter how crazy that they may be. There certainly are classes of satellites and scientific research equipment that can be tested by flying on a rockoon that would be considerably cheaper than by using a traditional missile launcher, even if those vehicles don't necessarily achieve full orbital velocity.